Helene Schjerfbeck review – a strange and silent beauty

Royal Academy of Arts, London
A retrospective of a Finnish national treasure celebrates a painter of great subtlety and a master of the self-portraitIt would be hard to think of a more overdue subject for a show than the Finnish painter Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946). Of all the Nordic artists exhibited here of late – from Christian Købke and Vilhelm Hammershøi to Per Kirkeby and Olafur Eliasson – Schjerfbeck is undoubtedly the least known in Britain. This is mainly to